What to watch, as a VB Developer at PDC (Lisa Feigenbaum)

After you discover the PDC videos online, and you watch the Future Directions for Microsoft Visual Basic, you may wonder what other sessions this year’s PDC has to offer for the VB developer… Lots!

Here’s a list of PDC sessions related to the VB language and IDE:

https://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/KYN02/ (See 1hr 28min)
Scott showed the new 2010 editor in his presentation. He explained that it’s built on MEF (the Microsoft Extensibility Framework) and WPF. He demonstrated the new extensibility model by showing how easy it is to build a cool add-in for visualizing XML comments. He also announced that the 2010 IDE will include features for TDD (test-driven development) and code focused development.

https://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL57/
In this session, Erik Meijer, Douglas Crockford, Gilad Bracha, Jeremy Siek, Anders Hejlsberg, and Wolfram Schulte discussed programming languages, in a panel format. Questions included:

What do you consider the most pressing problem in the industry today, and what is your language doing to solve it?
How important to the language is syntax?
Which is most important: the language, IDE, or libraries?
How much should languages be opened up for the community to contribute?
What is the difference between modeling and programming, or is there a difference?
Discuss the relationship between statically and dynamically typed languages.

TL54: Natural Interop with Silverlight, Office, and Python in Microsoft Visual C# and Microsoft Visual Basic

https://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL54/
Alex Turner went deep with examples on how to interoperate between dynamic and statically typed languages, using the new language features in VB 10 and C# 4.0. He showed a variety of examples, including Silverlight, Office applications, and more.

https://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL10/
Jim Hugunin, Partner Architect, presented the Dynamic Language Runtime and how it works with the new language features in VB 10 and C# 4.0, to allow interop between static and dynamic languages.

https://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL16/
Similar to the VB Futures session by Paul and Lucian, Anders presented a session about C# 2010 and beyond. The VB and C# talks both covered similar topics including variance, interoperability with dynamic languages, concurrency, and a future goal of exposing the compilers as a service. Both presentations also expressed a commitment to “co-evolution” of the VB and C# languages. Co-evolution means that going forward, there will not be a significant feature added to one language without simultaneously adding it to the other. One other interesting note for VB developers is that Anders showed named and optional parameters (long-time VB features) being newly added to C# in C# 4.0.